Tuesday, July 17, 2007

If I Had A Hammer!

Reconstructing your life is a bitch. I began this journey to find myself, get some money, move to a new town, get into a house or apartment suitable for my kids with good schools and a pool nearby, build a life that involves using my primary talent as a writer, and perhaps, time permitting find a lover/potential husband, without realizing that I was operating in the first two stages of grief, and that in places those two stages were overlapping.
In one moment, on the toilet this morning, looking through some material I've had since the week after Easter but never got around to reading, I got an epiphany. I'm grieving. Every step I've taken in nearly three months, every move I've made to reconstruct, falls into the patterns of the first two stages of grief.
The question that arises from this information is, "What do I do now?"
Do I keep going?
So far in the last two months I have:
  • moved from my home town in Arkansas to Houston, Texas,
  • gotten myself into a veterans reintegration program,
  • signed on with a temp agency,
  • enrolled in a job skills class where I am taking computer courses to improve my skills and likelihood of getting a permanent job in a very strong job market,
  • taught a writing class to veterans to help them get in touch with their creative memory and build on their communication skills,
  • worked with a designer to build a web page for my production company,
  • got a look-see deal with the marketing people of a major hotel chain to do a micro-documentary,
  • begun a screenplay,
  • joined an alliance of Texas motion picture professionals,
  • hooked up with a friend who is a producer as well as a former agent at ICM. International Creative Management, for those not in the know, is one of the foremost talent agencies in the world. Everybody and their Mama wants an in at ICM, and I've got one.
  • I've joined a church where the pastor encourages great big dreams.
  • I've drawn a picture of my dream home and posted it on my bathroom door.
  • I'm writing EVERY SINGLE DAY.
  • I've set goals financially that will make sure my boys never go without, no matter what happens to me from this point on. I've got a financial planner.

I would have said that I'm almost ready to go and get my boys. Life should be great, but it's not. I've screwed up so much in my life that right now, after this morning's revelation on grief and what grieving people do, I'm not really sure that I'm even real. How do I tell if what I've achieved is a product of the person I am intrinsically, or a product of the 'grief imaging' I have been doing for nearly three months? Is there really a way to know?

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